Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We investigated whether metacognitive errors (e.g., over- and under-confidence) were subject to a hypercorrection effect – an asymmetric adjustment for high- vs. low-confidence errors – analogous to that which has been demonstrated with performance errors. In a cue-outcome prediction task, on each trial, participants indicated which word would follow a particular image, and rated how confident they were in their answer. Consistent with the conventional hypercorrection effect in performance accuracy, there was an asymmetry in the adjustment of confidence ratings that did not match performance. However, contrary to previous reports of performance hypercorrection, metacognitive adjustment was greater for under- than over-confident responses.